Human nature / Is Our Identity in Intellect, Memory or Moral Character?

"Their research suggests that Edith was an example of a more general and rather surprising principle: Our identity comes more from our moral character than from our memory or intellect. [...] These results suggest something profound. Our moral character, after all, is what links us to other people. It’s the part of us that goes beyond our own tangle of neurons to touch the brains and lives of others. Because that moral character is central to who we are, there is a sense in which Edith literally, and not just metaphorically, lives on in the people who loved her."
Aqui

A origem do mal como a inversão da hierarquia legítima entre a sensibilidade e a consciência moral (Kant)

1)
Seria o mal consequência da nossa sensibilidade (desejos, pulsões, corpo, apetites, inclinações)?

– Não porque, se assim fosse, isso nos converteria em animais, e entre os animais não há mal. O "valor" é coisa Humana.

2)
O mal é proveniente da nossa razão prática, do nosso discernimento, da nossa maneira de pensar a vida? É consequência da nossa articulação intelectual sobre a vida?

– Não. Se tivéssemos uma razão endemicamente viciada, não seríamos humanos. Seríamos o Demónio (aquele que pratica o mal pelo mal). O mal que se justifica a si próprio.

3)
Será o mal a consequência da inversão da hierarquia do encontro entre estes dois elementos: os apetites e a razão? Qual deveria ser a hierarquia legítima entre os apetites e a razão?

A busca do prazer, a busca da felicidade, deveria estar limitada à consciência moral?

Qual é a inversão da hierarquia?

– É definir a lei moral a partir das conveniências do prazer e da felicidade.

Logo:

O Mal, resulta desta inversão: ao invés de ir buscar a felicidade dentro dos limites da consciência moral, define-se a consciência moral dentro dos limites dos interesses da felicidade.

Mas:

Acima das felicidades individuais existem as condições e as felicidades do colectivo — da humanidade como um todo.
Daí que a busca de felicidade se deve submeter à lei moral, à consciência da lei moral.

Arrisquemos, então, uma categorização do mal moral:

DEMÓNIO — pratica o mal pelo mal. Não aufere benefício algum para si.

CANALHA — pratica o mal pelo efeito benéfico que essa conduta traz para si.

PERVERSO — Tem prazer em praticar o mal.

SÁDICO — Não goza com a conduta malévola, mas com o sofrimento da vítima.

MEDÍOCRE — faz o mal por não fazer todo o bem que poderia fazer. A falta de busca da excelência. Aquele que se recusa ao aperfeiçoamento. O acomodado.

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NO, just doesn't mean NO to some people.

Step out of the moral matrix

E a mim deu-me isto

Clicar na imagem
Aqui

Vícios privados, públicas virtudes

A moral vigente e o preconceito esforçam-se por fazer um bom trabalho no que toca a contrariar o que há de mais individual e íntimo em cada ser humano.

To love is to suffer, to avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore, to be unhappy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you are getting this now?

‎Regarding love, well, what can you say? It´s not the quantity of your sexual relations that count. It's quality. On the other hand, if the quantity drops below once every eight months, I would definitely look into it.
Woody Allen

O busílis da questão

Hayek sobre valores morais e altruísmo



There are three levels of beliefs: we have in the first instance our intuitive moral feelings which are adapted to the small person, to person society, where we act for people whom we know and are served by people whom we know.

Then we have a society governed by moral traditions, which unlike what the rationalists believe, are not intelectual discoveries of men who designed them but that are a result of a process which I now prefer to describe as a biological term of "group selection". Those groups who had quite accidentally developed favourable habits such as the tradition of private property and the family who did succeed but who never understood this. So we owe our present extended order of human cooperation very largely to a moral tradition which the intellectual does not approve of because they have never been intellectually designed and it has to compete with a third level of moral beliefs. Those morals which the intellectuals design in the hope that they can better satisfy Man's instincts than the traditional rules do.

And we live in a world where three moral traditions are in constant conflict: the innate ones, the traditional ones and the intellectually designed ones, and ultimately, all our political conflicts of this time can be reduced as affected by a conflict between three moral traditions of a different nature, not only of different content: one being innate and spontaneous, the other traditions we have learned and the third, imagined designs of our intelect. I think you can explain the whole of the social conflicts of the last two hundred years by the conflict of three moral traditions.

...

The altruism is an instinct we've inherited from the small society where we know for whom we work, who we serve. When you pass from this, as I like to call it, concrete society where we are guided by what we see, to the abstract society which far transcends our range of vision it becomes necessary thet we are guided not by the knowledge of the effect of what we do, but through some abstract symbols. Now the only symbol that tells us where we can make the best contribution is profit and, in fact, by persuing profit we are as altruistic as we can possibly be because we extend our concern to people who are beyond our range of personal conception. This is the condition which makes it possible even to produce what I call an extended order. An order which is not determined by our aims, by our knowing what are the most urgent needs, but by impersonal mechanism who by a system of communication puts a label on certain things which are wholly impersonal. Now it's exactly this where the conflict between the traditional moral which is not altruistic, which emphasizes private property and the instinctive moral which is altruistic come in constant conflict. The very tradition from a concrete society where each serves the needs of other people whom he knows to an extended abstract society where most people serve the needs of others whom they do not know, whose existence they are not even aware of was only made possible by the abandonment of the altruism and solidarity as the main guiding factors which, I admit, are still the factors dominating our instincts and what restrains our instincts in this respect is the tradition of private property and the family, the two traditional rules of morals which are in conflict with instinct.